Climate change's nuclear fix, Paul Rogers

Wed, 11 May 2005 23:00:00 +0000

A recent spectacular aerial photograph of Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, shows the peak very largely devoid of ice and snow, possibly for the first time in 11,000 years. One of the most vivid contrasts in equatorial Africa has been the massive icecap on the 19,340 feet (5,895 metres) peak rising above the plains, but it is now possible that the icecap will disappear within a generation. The extent of the change is quite extraordinary. The icefields on Kilimanjaro were first surveyed accurately in 1912, and the current levels show a decline of 82% since then.

This highly visual expression of the impact of climate change comes at a time of warning over the rapid melting of the glaciers that stretch across the Himalaya mountain range. Apart from the polar icecaps, these mountains contain the greatest store of fresh water in the world, feeding numerous rivers across south and east Asia.

The impact of climate change on these glaciers will have two successive effects. First, an increase in river flow, as more of the icefields melt each year, leading to a higher risk of flooding in the low-lying lands close to river estuaries in China, India and Bangladesh. Next, as the glaciers shrink still further, the eventual result will be a pronounced decrease in river flow, increasing the risk of shortage of irrigation water affecting some of the world’s most productive croplands.

The dramatically visible evidence of climate change from Mount Kilimanjaro and elsewhere has further boosted concerns over climate change that are slowly moving towards the centre of the global political agenda – despite the resistance of the United States, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, to ratify the Kyoto agreement.

Two strong but contradictory responses are already evident. First, an enhanced interest in renewable energy resources and energy conservation, which will undoubtedly grow as the severe security implications of climate change come to be recognised. Second, campaigns advocating a new large-scale civil nuclear power programme, which argues that this is the only way to make a practical impact on carbon emissions in time.

The first trend is evident in several of the contributions to openDemocracy’s debate on the politics of climate change, including contributions by the British government’s chief scientific advisor David King and the eco-architect Bill Dunster. The second is apparent in a memo written by Joan MacNaughton, director-general of energy policy at Britain’s new department of productivity, energy and industry and leaked in the aftermath of the British election on 5 May, which calls for the civil nuclear programme to be revived and says that movement in this direction is being blocked by the government’s environment minister, Margaret Beckett.

For all the articles and features in openDemocracy’s debate on the politics of climate change, click here

The return of the pro-nuclear trend is surprising in the light of incidents like Three Mile Island, and above all, the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl appeared for several years to have done irreversible damage to the prospects for nuclear power. Now, the nuclear power lobby has clearly acquired a new lease of life. But its approach to countering climate change remains deeply problematic, for two reasons.

A costly business

The first is the exorbitant cost of nuclear power. This is something now being acutely realised in Britain, the earliest developer of civil nuclear power in the form of the network of Magnox nuclear power stations built in the 1950s. Britain is now also the first country to face the problems of decommissioning the now redundant plants, which include immense costs that are being passed on to this and later generations of taxpayers.

Indeed, if the full costs of decommissioning nuclear plants are factored in, the nuclear power industry is uneconomic and, in Britain at least, bankrupt. This has been avoided by the administrative manoeuvre of extracting the industry’s decommissioning costs from the department of trade and industry’s proposed Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), thereby transferring the financial burden onto ordinary citizens.

The NDA will be responsible for the decommissioning of the early Magnox power stations and some nuclear weapons plants and research facilities. The costs are expected to be at least £46 billion – close to £1,500 for every taxpayer in the country. The later generation of nuclear power stations, the advanced gas-cooled reactors, will also have to be decommissioned in due course, at equivalently great cost. Other countries, later starters in the nuclear game, will begin to face the same mountainous decommissioning costs as Britain over the next decade or so. Contrary to much current lobbying, nuclear power is very expensive.

A bomb too far

The second argument against nuclear power as a means of combating climate change is, if anything, even stronger than the economic one: it concerns the inevitable link between nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In October 1956, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II opened the country’s first nuclear power station at what was then Windscale (now Sellafield) on the Cumbrian coast in northwest England. The power station, Calder Hall, was hailed as the first proof of the value of the peaceful atom, a deeply misleading claim as its primary purpose was to operate in a manner that maximised the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Calder Hall was, in reality, a core part of Britain’s nuclear-weapons programme. In the same way, many types of civil nuclear power station can, if so organised, be run to optimise plutonium production.

Also by Paul Rogers, “The challenge of global climate change” (August 2003)

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Although plutonium is the fissile material that lends itself most easily to producing nuclear weapons, it is also possible to use the basic fuel of nuclear power stations, enriched uranium, for similar purposes. The level of enrichment (purity) normally has to be higher, but the enrichment plants producing reactor-grade uranium can be readily used to produce the more highly enriched weapons-grade material. In both ways, production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, the links with civil nuclear power are clear-cut, an aspect demonstrated strongly by current United States opposition to Iran developing a civil nuclear power programme.

All this appears unpersuasive to the nuclear-power lobby, who are convinced that the dawn of a new nuclear age is just around the corner – and are sanguine about the fact that any such new age would involve a worldwide surge in nuclear-power plant construction that would dwarf the programmes of the 1960s and 1970s. The end result would be a “nuclearised” world in which it would be formidably difficult to control the further proliferation of nuclear weapons, and which would also result in massively costly enterprises.

The counter-arguments to nuclear power are authoritative and convincing, but their proponents should recall the sheer lobbying strength of the nuclear power supporters forty years ago. Huge amounts of research and development funding went into nuclear power, squeezing out funding for renewable energy research for decades. Curbing greenhouse gas emissions will certainly not be easy, but it would be extraordinary if the mistakes of forty years ago were repeated.

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Climate change's nuclear fix, Paul Rogers